Mike Pettine says all options still on the table for starting QB job

The starting quarterback job for the Cleveland Browns was fully up for grabs for either Brian Hoyer or Johnny Manziel Monday night against the Washington Redskins.

Instead, both quarterbacks fumbled away a chance to seize the job.

Head coach Mike Pettine had wanted to name a starting quarterback by Tuesday. Now that decision may have to be delayed.

“All the options are still on the table,” Pettine said. “It’s still something we would like to do but we will see.”

Hoyer and Manziel were wholly uninspiring against Washington. Hoyer completed just 2-of-6 passes for 16 yards while Manziel was 7-for-16 for 65 yards and a touchdown with an obscene gesture thrown in as well.

Pettine said it’s possible the team waits through another preseason game before determining who will start against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 1 despite their initial hope to choose early this week. Neither quarterback has produced any truly stellar play to prove they are the best option for the job in the Browns two preseason games. It may take some more time before Pettine will feel comfortable finally making a decision.

For three teams in the AFC East, March has brought some major changes to their rosters.

The Jets brought back cornerbacks Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie while also trading for wide receiver Brandon Marshall. The Bills traded for running back LeSean McCoy and signed several players, including tight end Charles Clay, while the Dolphins landed the biggest fish on the free agent market by signing defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh.

The Dolphins have made several other moves as well in executive vice president of football operations Mike Tannenbaum’s first year with the team, leaving Tannenbaum to quip that he’s been so busy that he hasn’t noticed the weather in Miami. The moves have left the Dolphins and their fellow 2014 AFC East also-rans looking better on paper, but Tannenbaum knows that has limited value once the season starts.

“Look, it really doesn’t mean anything sitting here in March,” Tannenbaum said, via Ben Volin of the Boston Globe. “What’s important is what it looks like on opening day and every week. [The Patriots are] going to look different come the regular season like we are, so we’ve got a long, long way to go.”

Tannenbaum was with the Jets for many years and had several splashy offseasons while serving as the team’s General Manager without winding up where the Patriots were in February, so he knows well that winning in the offseason doesn’t guarantee anything in the regular season. He also knows that as much as things may change for the Patriots, they’ll have Bill Belichick and Tom Brady when the regular season does roll around and that’s proven to be too much to handle for the rest of the division for most of the last two decades.

Years ago, June 1 had extreme significance on the NFL calendar. Teams looking to reduce the cap hit from cutting a veteran player would wait until June 1, resulting in half or more of the acceleration to hit the cap in the following league year.

In 2006, the NFL changed the rule, allowing teams to cut two players per year before June 1, with a June 1 designation. Few teams currently have cap issues; as a result, the entire notion of using the designation or waiting until June 1 to cut a player has become largely irrelevant.

June 1 had continued significance for another reason. After June 1, unrestricted free agents signed by other teams don’t count toward the compensatory draft-pick formula. Starting this year, that date will move from June 1 to May 12, according to the league office.

The Competition Committee had been considering shifting the date from June 1 to May 1. With the draft still happening as of May 1, it makes sense to let the draft end and to let the dust settle before allowing free agents to sign without the move helping their former team or potentially hurting their new one.

The shift gives free agents more of an opportunity to participate in the offseason program. It also gives teams reason to wait on adding some of the currently available free agents, in order to avoid reducing their potential haul of compensatory picks.

The Ravens have mastered the craft of waiting to sign unrestricted free agents until the deadline has come and gone. Today’s addition of quarterback Matt Schaub doesn’t change that. Because he was cut by the Raiders, Schaub’s addition neither helps the Raiders nor hurts the Ravens when it comes to determining compensatory selections.

Vincent Brown, a once-promising wide receiver whose career has been plagued by injuries, has landed in Indianapolis.

The Colts announced today that they’ve signed Brown to a free agent contract.

The Chargers drafted Brown in the third round in 2011, and he made some big plays in limited action as a rookie, catching 19 passes for 300 yards and three touchdowns. But he missed his entire second season after suffering a broken ankle in the preseason.

In 2013 Brown got back on track, with 41 catches for 472 yards. But in 2014 a calf injury forced him to miss all of training camp, and the Chargers waived him with an injury settlement. He ended up catching on with the Raiders, but had only 12 catches for 118 yards.

If Brown can get healthy, the Colts may have gotten a bargain on a low-priced contract. But Brown’s history makes that a very big “if.”

The Raiders added several free agents in an attempt to solidify their defense last season, but the results weren’t what Oakland hoped.

The team finished last in the league in points allowed on their way to another losing season and another offseason spent bringing in new faces while getting rid of players who were part of the problems last year. The Raiders added another name to the discard pile on Tuesday.

Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that the team has released defensive lineman Antonio Smith. Smith started all 16 games for Oakland last season, recording 20 tackles, three sacks and a forced fumble. Smith had a particularly tough time against the run last season, but he’s been a durable player and effective pass rusher throughout his career so he may earn another look before the offseason is out.

The Raiders added Dan Williams and re-signed C.J. Wilson on the defensive line in free agency. Adding another defensive lineman is a possibility at the top of the draft, although the Raiders may also opt to bolster their offense by adding Amari Cooper or Kevin White to their receiving corps.

If the Buccaneers already were planning to pick quarterback Jameis Winston with the first overall pick in the draft, nothing that happened during the player’s Pro Day workout changed the team’s position.

If anything, the Bucs are even more determined to draft Winston.

“Very good. Excellent. Had a great day,” G.M. Jason Licht said regarding the workout, via JoeBucsFan.com. “This was outstanding. He threw a full nine innings.”

Licht said Winston displayed sufficient strength and endurance to end talk about whether he’s in shape.

“He showed his arm strength to throw No. 1 to throw 100 and whatever it was,” Licht said, adding that he was most impressed with Winston’s “leadership and arm strength and conditioning.”

The Buccaneers could, in theory, work out a contract with Winston and make him the first overall pick at any time. It now appears to be a matter of time until that happens.

The Panthers continued to add bargain free agents to help shore up their special teams.

They announced they had signed unrestricted free agent linebacker Jason Trusnik to a one-year deal.

Trusnik spent the last four seasons with Miami, and has also played with the Jets and Browns. He started five games for the Dolphins last year, but they’re looking for depth and kicking game help with this one.

“Jason is an experienced player who adds more competition to the linebacker position and has also been a special teams ace,” Panthers coach Ron Rivera said. “I expect him to come in and be a leader. Even though he is new to us, he’s got veteran savvy to him.”

The Panthers could use that, as they try to improve a team that went to the playoffs the last two seasons from the bottom third of the roster up.

Last week, the NFL gave the ATC spotter assigned to each game the power to stop the action and remove a player who requires medical attention, if the officials and/or training staffs don’t notice that a player is in distress.

Because any stoppage initiated by the spotter doesn’t result in a charged time out, teams could be tempted to instruct, for example, defensive players who are facing a no-huddle attack to pretend to be disoriented in order to get a break in the action without consequence. But the spotter is a safety net; to avoid a charged time out in the final two minutes of a half or the game, the player would have to fake the injury so that no one on the field notices, but that only the spotter does.

So while the temptation to fake injuries exists, the new medical timeout rule does nothing to make a fake injury even more enticing — unless game officials decide to stop looking for potentially woozy players and to defer to the spotter. If that happens, with spotters becoming not the last line of defense but first, a greater incentive to fake injuries will arise, since there will be no lost timeout or 10-second runoff if it happens late in a game.

Either way, fake injuries will happen from time to time. For now, it’s unlikely that the new rule will result in more of them.

NFL teams are going to do anything they can to get background on a player before they draft him.

Including, apparently, stalking.

According to Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports, Jameis Winston’s quarterback coach George Whitfield pulled the curtain back on the kind of scrutiny Winston is under.

Whitfield said he was told Winston was “secretly shadowed” on one of his Scouting Combine flights by a team.

Of course, having team personnel on flights into and out of Indianapolis that week isn’t an unusual occurrence. (Connecting in Atlanta on my way home, there were a handful of assistant coaches and about half the SEC wide receivers on my plane.)

And if people were eyeballing Winston in the Indianapolis airport, he might have left them with a positive impression.

The Giants entered last offseason with an offense that team co-owner John Mara called “broken,” a new offensive coordinator in Ben McAdoo and quarterback Eli Manning in need of ankle surgery, but things wound up coming together nicely on that side of the ball by the time the season came to an end.

The team may have finished with a dismal record and missed the playoffs for the third straight season, but Manning cut his interceptions sharply while putting up some of the best numbers of his career. That came with Odell Beckham setting the league on fire as a rookie, but without the injured Victor Cruz and that’s part of the reason why Manning thinks things will be even better this time around.

“This year will be a much easier transition, knowing that we have been through so much of it already,” Manning said, via the team’s website. “It’s definitely a different starting point. I feel good about it. I feel that I have a good understanding of it, but there is still room to grow and that is why I try to keep it as fresh in my mind as possible. Looking at old game-plan sheets and calling plays in my head — throwing routes with receivers trying to call out plays to myself, so you don’t let it slip away. It was new last year and it wasn’t something I have been doing for 10 years, so you want to keep it fresh and go through your reminders and all your checks. So when we come back I haven’t taken a step backwards and have to re-learn things. It is still all there. There will be new stuff and we will be taking it to another level.”

The addition of Shane Vereen gives the Giants another weapon to use in the passing game, which should be strong with Cruz returning to the lineup. For the Giants to break their trend of subpar finishes, though, they’ll need the defense to make a similar rebound to the one that the offense experienced in 2014 and there’s not much Manning and company can do to make that happen.

The 49ers have been talking to a variety of free agent linebackers in recent days and they signed one of them on Tuesday.

Desmond Bishop’s agent told Matt Barrows of the Sacramento Bee that Bishop will return to the team on a one-year deal. Bishop signed with the team late last season after injuries gutted their linebacking corps and made two tackles in two games with the team.

Bishop also spent time with the Cardinals in 2014 and played four games for the Vikings in 2013 after missing the entire 2012 season. Before moving to Minnesota, Bishop spent five seasons with the Packers. He was a starter for the final two of those seasons and totaled more than 100 tackles each season while also recording eight sacks.

Bishop will likely fight for time behind Navorro Bowman and Michael Wilhoite as long as Bowman has recovered from the knee injury that kept him out for all of last year. Nick Moody and Shayne Skov are also on hand as reserve options for the Niners in the wake of the retirements of Patrick Willis and Chris Borland this month.

Add the Jets to the list of teams who won’t be going away for camp this summer.

The team announced they would not be returning to SUNY-Cortland this year for training camp, staying put at their own training facility instead.

“SUNY Cortland felt like home because of the tremendous local support we received during our time there,” owner Woody Johnson said in a statement. “President Erik Bitterbaum and the university staff, as well as the families and businesses of Central New York, all went above and beyond to embrace our organization and create a comfortable environment for our team and fans. They always will be a part of our Jets family.”

The Jets had gone to Cortland five of the last six years, but referred to “locating camp closer to the team’s core fan base in the New York/North Jersey metropolitan area.”

They’re not alone in that desire to stay close, as 21 of 32 teams stay at their own places.

Between the cost and logistical challenges of going to another place, more teams are finding it to be not worth the trouble to go away, forgoing whatever bonding might happen when forced into an unfamiliar environment.

Matt Schaub, who spent last season holding a clipboard in Oakland, has signed with the Ravens, according to Peter King of TheMMQB.com.

The Ravens had been looking for a backup with some experience, as the only other quarterbacks on their roster are the totally untested Keith Wenning and Bryn Renner.

Schaub is experienced, having been the starter in Houston for seven seasons. But he looks just about washed up at age 33. Last year he barely got on the field for the Raiders, and the year before that he suffered through a miserable season in Houston.

The Ravens hope Flacco will stay healthy and Schaub will never see the field, but if something does happen to Flacco, Schaub at least gives them the presence of someone who has started in the NFL. Even if it’s been a long time since he played well.

The world’s most irrelevant billionaire soon will be even less relevant.

Former Browns owner Randy Lerner, whose commitment to the franchise was questioned at time based on his ownership of an English soccer club, reportedly will sell the English soccer club for $222 million, according to the London Daily Mirror.

Lerner reportedly paid $94.2 million for Aston Villa of the Premier League a decade ago, which means that he has generated a profit of more than $127 million.

In 2012, Lerner sold the Browns to Jimmy Haslam for more than $1 billion. Lerner’s father, Al, founded the reconstituted Browns in 1999.

With Reggie Bush now in San Francisco, the Lions are seeking a complement to starting running back Joique Bell. It might just be a running back who’s already on the roster.

Theo Riddick, who has played for the Lions the last two years, seems to be in line for more work now that Bush is out.

“I do think that he’s going to improve,” Lions coach Jim Caldwell said, via the Detroit News. “He has all of the qualities. If you’re smart, if you’re tough, if you’re disciplined, if you have a great work ethic, there’s improvement ahead. And he has all those things, so I think he’s going to improve. And I think he’ll force us to get him the ball a little bit more in some situations.”

Riddick has shown some promise as a receiver out of the backfield and lined up in the slot, but as a runner, if Riddick “has all of the qualities,” he sure hasn’t shown it yet. In two NFL seasons Riddick has played in 28 games and carried only 29 times for 76 yards, a 2.6-yard average. The longest run of his career went for nine yards.

No one played particularly well in the Lions’ running game last year. Detroit ranked 28th in both rushing yards and yards per carry last season. The Lions need someone to do better than that in 2015. Maybe that someone can be Riddick.